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Fujiwara FKM rehandled

I really wanted to try my hands on western handles, so I've stolen my wife's favorite knife for a few days to rehandle it. A Fujiwara 150mm petty. Some pictures.

Tried to preserve original shape without much curves here. Used wood from Burl Source: Hawaiian Koa and Ebony. Actually I've used those burls for another wa styled handle, but the remaining parts were big enough to make a new handle for FKM.

Made a number of mistakes, including:

Used too busy design

Not using pins (wanted to use mosaic pins, but my order from some online store could easily take another month or two to arrive). Used a piece of brass tube instead

Spacers are not properly connected in few places

Scratched the tang and was too lazy to polish it

Still struggling to finish wood properly. This particular one was polished pretty badly by a sandpaper progression from 80 to 400 and a few touches of steel wool.

Wasn't accurate enough when drilling holes for the metal tube… resulted in small wood chipping

But it was fun and I got a ton of experience, while my wife got her beloved knife back.

Thanks, but it wasn't my first western actually
the first one was very similar however… Tojiro 270 ITK breadk knife.

… for the first attempt I didn't use any pins or tubes (because I simply haven't any) so it's just epoxy. And not that I'm that big fan of color spacers, it's just I've found my epoxy isn't strong enough glueing wood and metal together, but if I put spacer in between it becomes pretty strong.

And I used very time consuming method: glued together everything before shaping wood. So all the shaping was done freehand with rasp and file. Probably took me 2 hours or so. Personally I like this handle more then my second (much more complex) fujiwara handle.

I think the handle turned out better than you are giving yourself credit for.
Now if I could give my 2 cents worth of advice.
Koa undergoes a transformation when you go beyond 600 grit. Preferably 1000+ grit to show off the full potential in the figure.
2nd, you can still turn the tube into a mosaic by inserting different sized metal rods and epoxy. Or crushed turquoise, shell or ....? and epoxy.
All in all the handle you made looks good.
You are pretty brave learning while using expensive handle material like the koa.

I think the handle turned out better than you are giving yourself credit for.
Now if I could give my 2 cents worth of advice.
Koa undergoes a transformation when you go beyond 600 grit. Preferably 1000+ grit to show off the full potential in the figure.
2nd, you can still turn the tube into a mosaic by inserting different sized metal rods and epoxy. Or crushed turquoise, shell or ....? and epoxy.
All in all the handle you made looks good.
You are pretty brave learning while using expensive handle material like the koa.

Mark, thanks for advices. I'm gonna try refinish this handle and polish it up to 3000 grit. Also I've tried your method of wet sanding to cover wood pores, but probably did something wrong and gonna try it once more.

Koa block I bought from you was big enough for 2 handles and since I'm running out of unrehandled knives, I decided to use koa on this one. Otherwise I would end up with nice wood and no more unrehandled knives. And you might remember my problems with cracks on ebony… so I couldn't just throw it away and cut small pieces to be used as ferrule.

Making my own mosaic pins seems like a fun idea Might borrow some beads from my wife and see if they looks ok crushed and epoxied.